Carl Ludwig Siegel
| Carl Ludwig Siegel | |
|---|---|
Carl Ludwig Siegel in 1975
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| Born |
December 31, 1896 Berlin, German Empire |
| Died | April 4, 1981 (aged 84) Göttingen, West Germany |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions |
Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Institute for Advanced Study |
| Alma mater | University of Göttingen |
| Doctoral advisor | Edmund Landau |
| Doctoral students |
Kurt Mahler Christian Pommerenke Theodor Schneider Jürgen Moser |
| Known for | Number theory |
| Notable awards | Wolf Prize in Mathematics (1978) |
Carl Ludwig Siegel (December 31, 1896 – April 4, 1981) was a German mathematician specialising in number theory and celestial mechanics. He is known for, amongst other things, his contributions to the Thue–Siegel–Roth theorem in Diophantine approximation and the Siegel mass formula for quadratic forms. He was named as one of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century.
André Weil, without hesitation, named Siegel as the greatest mathematician of the first half of the 20th century. Atle Selberg said of Siegel and his work:
Siegel was born in Berlin, where he enrolled at the Humboldt University in Berlin in 1915 as a student in mathematics, astronomy, and physics. Amongst his teachers were Max Planck and Ferdinand Georg Frobenius, whose influence made the young Siegel abandon astronomy and turn towards number theory instead. His best student was Jürgen Moser, one of the founders of KAM theory (Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser), which lies at the foundations of chaos theory. Another notable student was Kurt Mahler, the number theorist.
Siegel was an antimilitarist, and in 1917, during World War I he was committed to a psychiatric institute as a conscientious objector. According to his own words, he withstood the experience only because of his support from Edmund Landau, whose father had a clinic in the neighborhood. After the end of World War I, he enrolled at the Georg-August University of Göttingen, studying under Landau, who was his doctoral thesis supervisor (Ph.D. in 1920). He stayed in Göttingen as a teaching and research assistant; many of his groundbreaking results were published during this period. In 1922, he was appointed professor at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität of Frankfurt am Main as the successor of Arthur Moritz Schönflies. Siegel, who was deeply opposed to Nazism, was a close friend of the docents Ernst Hellinger and Max Dehn and used his influence to help them. This attitude prevented Siegel's appointment as a successor to the chair of Constantin Carathéodory in Munich. In Frankfurt he took part with Dehn, Hellinger, Paul Epstein, and others in a seminar on the history of mathematics, which was conducted at the highest level. In the seminar they read only original sources. Siegel's reminiscences about the time before World War II are in an essay in his collected works.
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